Deadly Lust by McCay Vernon

Author:McCay Vernon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2014-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The Task Force

With the disappearance of Donetha Snead-Haile in April 1993, Sheriff Neil Perry felt there was a strong possibility the same killer was responsible for all three murders, especially as the missing woman had a similar lifestyle to the two previous victims. Since Anita Stevens’s murder, his department’s detectives had tracked down hundreds of leads, interviewed many suspects, and filed reams of reports on their investigation. They were still actively working the cases, but they had run out of leads.

In 1996 Sheriff Perry put together a special task force that would pull all the investigations together. He met with Special Agent Jack Wise, of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, to enlist that agency’s help. The FDLE is an agency established by former Florida governor Lawton Chiles. Its purpose is to provide statewide assistance to individual law enforcement entities within the state and to coordinate crime information into one central unit.

With the involvement of FDLE in the St. Augustine case, information obtained from all sources could now be coordinated under one central unit, while still giving local law enforcement broad latitude in the investigation. FDLE was also available to serve as a buffer if the case became political as sometimes occurs in high-profile cases. (While local sheriffs were elected and vulnerable to some extent to political pressure or public opinion, the FDLE investigators were not.)

Another important function FDLE filled was providing expert analytical help and analysis of criminal intelligence through access to databases and other sophisticated crime-solving tools. With statewide jurisdiction, the FDLE extended the effective range of the local investigators. This linking function was critical in tracking down serial killers, rapists, and child molesters. Without this pooling of information between jurisdictions, isolated crimes in different communities were quite often not recognized as having been committed by the same person. The lack of this kind of information sharing in many states was one of the major reasons why serial murderers often escaped capture for years or, in some cases, were never caught.

Sheriff Perry assigned detectives Frank Welborn and Jennifer Ponce from his Criminal Investigation Division to the task force, plus other resource staff when needed. Law enforcement agencies from adjacent areas were invited to participate, but they were mostly too small to commit their limited personnel full-time to the effort. Special Agent Allen Strickrott played a lead role as FDLE’s representative to the task force. One of Strickrott’s first functions was to discuss with all concerned parties the strict guidelines FDLE followed in reviewing cold homicide cases from other agencies. Together he and the local law-enforcement personnel discussed what resources would be available to them, what steps had already been taken in the cases, what evidence was available, and how valuable it might prove to be. They also reviewed the suspects and witnesses who had been identified and whether or not they were currently available. Another issue was the legal implications, such as whether the prosecutor involved agreed with reopening the case, and whether or not the statute of limitations might have expired.

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